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Stay away from the scripts creted by phplemon.com

Few months ago I was looking for an advertising network platform and AdQuick from www.phplemon.com seemed quite nice. There was another platform (I think something called buysellads clone), but that didn't even have the demo work properly (so I could only imagine how 'nice' it would work on my standalone site).

Since AdQuick had a price I could live with, I decided to purchase it and also got BlogQuick with it. Super, I thought, I have 2 sites in mind and these would work great. Yeah, sure ...

As soon as I installed AdQuick I started seeing how bad it works. There's some sort of a manual, but it has only few details in it, so for 2 weeks I kept on 'playing' with the script, trying to GUESS how it works and what it does. I won't comment on the template (it's all in tables, which most designers have stopped using in layouting since the 15th century), I never keep a platform un-designed, so I understood I'll have to put in some more work to make it look decent.

If only it would work.

Since I stumbled upon some serious bugs, I thought contacting the support would be a good idea. There is no forum attached to the site (which would help since, if the developers cannot be bothered to help, maybe other members can), no chat, no phone. Just an email contact form. Just as you helped me with the support, they did. NO RESPONSE!

I had to hire a programmer to solve some of the bugs, so that I can actually start the project. To this day it doesn't work properly (won't track the stats correctly, doesn't have the passwords encrypted, there are no ways to delete/stop a campaign etc.) and I'll have to AGAIN pay a programmer to solve these issues and maybe I can have a running platform.

BlogQuick is even worse. Absolutely no manuals or serious instructions, again, I had to mess with it for weeks to understand what it does. The javascripts don't work. The badges don't work, again, another piece of crap.

As you can guess, if I want to release the project, I'll hire again another programmer to solve the bugs the developer should have helped me with.

It's not a huge price, but, if you sell something, stand by your own product. Not receiving any support in MONTHS is really bad business. If they don't want to support the platforms, how about not selling them anymore? Close down the shop and stop wasting our time and money.

Yes, I would love for the developers to see this thread and maybe NOW provide the support I haven't received in months. I want to release my sites and start making money, after paying hundreds of bucks to repair their buggy platforms.

Again, welcome to why I don't believe in putting advertising on websites in the first place -- they're ALL sleazeball shits with broken outdated half-assed code, that offer little if any legitimate support.

... just as I don't believe in blindly slapping together off the shelf scripts, sleazeball shortcuts like frameworks -- even if you know what you are doing! It's just more work and more expense in the long run!

Stick with the well established networks that have a proven track record of being a quality piece of software/code to have on your website.

To many people look for something cheap because they can't get approved on the established websites or affford the best software and get screwed in the end by people who create clone scripts and never update them.

Often a script is developed not for the purpose of reselling but for one's own site(s). This creates a couple of problems:

1. Little of no good documentation
2. Often the coding is rushed to get the thing out the door

Later down the track it evolves into something that is sell-able. I however expect that the price should reflect the level of documentation (or at least sell it as is ).

Some lessons from the Original Poster's experience:

1. Make sure it has good support if you need it. If you are not a programmer this is critical as most scripts will not seemlessly work in all places
2. If you are concerned about styling (Tables vs CSS etc) check the source code of the demo, this will give you a feel for the maturity of the designer. ( Just be aware that there are still very good application using table layouts only because they are old and it is a massive job to convert)
3. Get a developer to review something before you buy it. They can point out any gotchas that might jump out and bite you down the track

You get what you pay for. and adding to deathshadows response. taking off the shelf scripts and slapping them together is like having a half baked pizza. hot and cooked on the outside and frozen in the middle.

And to be on the devils advocate side for a minute, You should have done your research along with checking out the developers, what kind of support they provide etc.

I know that it is real easy for a lot of you newbies out there to get suckered in by the what seems nice and cool stuff with cheap prices.
Rather then hire a Pro coder to do it the right way and in the long run it still would be cheaper and the your best bet.

"taking off the shelf scripts and slapping them together is like having a half baked pizza. hot and cooked on the outside and frozen in the middle."

That is true, but only to a point!

BUT using your example, in order to make the best pizza there is no problem with getting a good ready made "off the shelf" base and then create the magic by adding your "secret" sauce and all of the other stuff which will create the MAGIC!

To use the tried and tested scripts as a base to create great web projects is a clever thing to do.

Having said that, over the 18 years that I have been in this biz, I have never succeeded in getting the best of my coders to agree with me on this point

I absolutely hate slapping extra code for a stock product. I never ever buy stock scripts other than a theme for my wordpress. But all my other projects are designed from the ground up by myself.

There are so many reasons why you should not buy stock product the main one is that it is quickly out of date. And you would always want to add customization. So why not get yourself a good programmer and keep him in your contact list when new ideas needs to be developed.

I'm sad to hear you have had bad experience, but maybe this is a good learning curve for you to stop buying stock products and get a quality developer!

I bought the script too, hoping I will customise and use. I ended up abandoning it after spending so much more

I think any programmer selling scripts should as a minimum ensure that it is bug free, has adequate documentation and a working support system. Unfortunately, in my experience, that is rare.

If you are going to sell stuff for money, there is a level of quality that is expected. Heck, even free software is expected work as described
I think the only way to keep these script vendors honest is to write reviews.

Hi fellas and sorry for the 5 month-bump, but I want to share my current experience with phplemon.

For a few weeks, I've been looking for a script similiar to buysellads, where you can be the middlehand for publishers and advertisers. I found AdQuick by phplemon and it looked like it was what I needed. After a few days of researching, reading both good and bad reviews, I decided to give it a go since I found live sites running it and it looked pretty good. So, I paid and got the script sent to my mail a few hours later. All good so far.

Uploaded it to my VPS, installed it and started translating everything into my language since it was gonna be a local website. Created a few testaccounts to try it out and it is really bad organized. And you cant really administrate the website listings submitted by your users, I find that very strange. Should I really have to go through the database to change it? Very well, I can get used to that. Did some more testing, payouts is really bad. And I mean really bad. Basically there's a button in admin controlpanel where you can view who's gonna get paid and how much, click on a button to send the payment and after that, its gone. You can't find that payout ANYWHERE, no logs at all. At this point, I was getting annoyed. I'm thinking that after all, I'll be dealing with peoples money here and want to have full control.

Started to analyze the database, and it was here I found the really bothering stuff. The passwords are stored without any encryption what so ever. That's right, stored in plain-text. And yes, that's a big problem itself. But here's another bad thing: no anti-spam at login what so ever.

Did I hear bruteforce?
Did I hear SQL injections?
Did I hear my users got their accounts hacked with their paypal emails changed so payouts was sent to the wrong (read hackers own) paypal?
Would I be responsible if this happened?

The answer of all above, is yes.

Ofcourse, this made the script useless to me. I can't let people spend and store their money on a site like this. So, I sent phplemon a email asking for a refund because of the security issues and that I would be happy to re-purchase the script when this was fixed, without answer or refund. BUT, my license was deactivated. (At least for a while) So I opened a Paypal dispute, phplemon answered the dispute earlier today, 16 hours after I opened the dispute and told me that they cant refund my money since there's a digital product, but they would be happy to work with me to solve any bugs. Plus, they said that my license was still active. Yep, it's active now. (Lucky me I took a printscreen of the site when it told me that my license was deactivated) And right after they posted that, before I did'nt even had a chance to answer, they escalated the dispute to a claim so I could'nt answer their message for paypal to see OR show them the print telling me that the license in fact was deactivated.

So, I probably wont see my money. Sucks to be me. And I'm not telling anyone of you thinking about buying a script from phplemon what to do, I'm simply sharing my experience with them.

What do you think? Is there a chance that paypal will give me my money after all?

After having a quick look on the page, I'm a bit trouble by anyone thinking this is worth the money.
A few points:
1. The admin demo doesn't work - it returns a 404-error
2. The documentation is very non-technical (it basically just describes different features), and is dated "last revision October 2010". That's over 4 years old.
3. The HTML is abysmally bad.
4. Quickly looking at the demo-site, I can't find any way for any type of login/account to recover passwords or similar. Not that that's a big problem when the passwords are stored as plain-text...
5. The design is not very good - it's simple, but outdated.
6. Looking at the blog, ver. 2.5 was released in january 2013, while 2.6 (the latest) was released in january 2014 - one year between updates doesn't bode well for support or quick response when reporting issues

Granted, I've got no need for any of their scripts or services, but it seems to me that there are lots of warning-signs right there to warn off potential buyers.

After having a quick look on the page, I'm a bit trouble by anyone thinking this is worth the money.

Click to expand...

It's a stunning example of what I mean when talking about "nube predation" -- the people behind stuff like this makes their money on the ignorance of the average consumer. It goes with what I often say about all the various web technologies; if you don't learn the underlying tech, you're not qualified to make a rational decision on what to use. More so, I don't trust paying for server software anymore; there are so many free projects out there that are BETTER than the pay one, I can't fathom why people would waste money on the pay ones... and quite often pay to play is little more than a way to take your money and run; ESPECIALLY when it comes to digital purchases. (even more sad when games and porn are more trustworthy when it comes to digital purchases than 'applications' are!)

Another of the things I always say -- if the front end, something that any idiot should be able to do -- is bad, how bad is the much more complex back-end code, much less the product.

Even at first glance, the inaccessible fonts and fixed width layouts are warning signs -- under the hood the tranny doctype, tables for layout, multiple H1 are all massive warning flags that the developer doesn't know enough about web development to be doing work for themselves, much less for others.

But again, unless you have the skills to make websites yourself properly, or more specifically systems like these from scratch yourself, you're not qualified to know if someone like this is raping you or not; and most of the time anyone who does know enough to make an informed decision does get a chance to look at it, well... see most of the posts in this thread ripping said products and sites to shreds.

Though to be fair, I say the same thing about jQuery, CodeIgnitor, Blueprint, YUI, Turdpress, HTML5...

After a good nights sleep, I feel more angry than I did yesterday. Phplemon offered me to help me sort out the "bugs", right. If on of your "bugs" is unencrypted passwords which is a very basic thing, I don't wanna think about all the other standards you left out. Sad that they're still in business.

And I've used several paid scripts before, some of them works very good actually and my most popular website is using a $49 script with very few modifications. But yes, I can see your point.

Maybe a good website would be a "whitelist" for paid scripts? Users provide testemonials about scripts they have bought, provide some way to actually show that they're not faking the review, etc. If a page like that got some traction, you could probably persuade script-providers to actually give you a free license for testing and providing positive reviews. Probably some sites like this exists already, but apart from some relatively okay-ish sites like Stack Overflow (good site, but not really what I'm talking about), forums etc. there's not really any good sites doing this, is there?

I just received an email from Paypal telling me that they cant refund my money...I contacted Phplemon asking them to fix the issues I pointed out, let's see how helpful they really are now, since they told Paypal that they would "be happy" to help me? Should be interesting.

BUT, anyone of you thinking about buying this script (or probably any other script from http://phplemon.com): DON'T DO IT!

i had a bad experience too with phplemon,
i bought this for 149 $(he gave me discount 100$) , and i only got ad_quick with has a license system. That was different from his spesial offer that was written on his website. Until now, there is no support from phplemon. He promised me to give:

Free Updates and Support For Life

phplemon.com Footer Link Removal

Software Installation

3 Extra AdQuick Language Files. Russian, German, Portuguese

2 Extra BlogQuick Language Files. Italian and Turkish

This is fake.
Can we ask to paypall about his account so his account be banned or something???